


Winter Colors and Male Circumcision

by perfectpro



Series: Matchmaker [4]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-17
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 02:11:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5229887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles ends up receiving a package intended for Lydia, and Scott is a little too curious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Winter Colors

Stiles missed school, and he doesn’t care how nerdy that sounds. College life suits him well, and four in the morning is a totally respectable time to go to bed, no matter what Scott thinks. Coffee is the only food group he really gets enough of, and he writes his papers fueled only by caffeine and determination. So when his plane touches down, he breathes out a sigh of relief, stretches his shoulders, and waits for the flight assistant’s approval on the intercom before he turns on his phone and texts his dad that they’ve landed. 

Scott’s been back for a few days already, so he’s the one waiting at the terminal with a sign that to most people looks like gibberish. Stiles can’t help but breaking out into a smile when he sees him, however annoyed he is that Scott actually tried to write down his first name. “The Polish alphabet isn’t the same as the English one, dude.”

Rolling his eyes, Scott shoves the sign under his arm and tucks Stiles there as well, laughing as he does so, “Look, I tried, give me some credit. How else was I supposed to figure out how to spell it?” he asks, standing back and raising an eyebrow as he looks his best friend up and down. “Also, I thought people who lived in California got tan over the summer.”

“Um, you could have looked at the housing documents from last year, which is how you found out. And fuck you, I’m like a whole shade darker than when I left, check it out,” Stiles declares, turning his arm over for emphasis. He knows he doesn’t tan well, eighteen years of living in Arizona taught him that much, and he doesn’t need or appreciate Scott and his perfect bronze skin pointing it out.

It’s clear Scott doesn’t believe him, but he lets it go none the less, starting with how moving in has gone. “All your boxes came in yesterday, I forged your signature, hope you don’t mind. Better than having them come back tomorrow and you having to go a day without everything.”

With a laugh, Stiles stretches his arms above his head and takes a moment to be thankful to have the room to stretch out. Airplanes are not famed for their leg room, he thinks sardonically, turning to say something to Scott, who is texting on his phone intently. “I’d rather not be that minimalist if I don’t have to be. Thanks for signing, buddy, let’s go grab dinner or something because I am starving.” After he claps a hand on the back of Scott’s shoulder, his friend looks up and smiles, shoving his phone away in his pocket.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Scott agrees, grabbing Stiles’s small duffel bag and waving the other boy off when he reaches for it.

-x-

The apartment is just like he remembered it being when they got the tour four months ago, and Stiles spends the first thirty minutes running around on the hardwood with his socks on and boxers on, a la Tom Cruise in _Risky Business_. And because he’s the best, Scott joins in and even puts the song on, and they skid along and try to avoid running into the boxes taking up their living room.

The party comes to an end when Scott is laughing too hard at Stiles’s impersonation of Greenburg, the professor of their economics class last semester, to bother with looking at where he’s going. He slams into a stack of Stiles’s boxes, giving them a pretty hard hit even if he manages to not knock them over. The boys exchange a minor, panicked glance before launching into action, pulling them away from the wall and opening them to examine whether any actual damage had been done.

The first box is fine, just winter gear that obviously wasn’t going to be necessary in California, even if Stiles did go home for Christmas. The worst thing that happened to that box is a few of his sweaters aren’t properly folded anymore, but that could be due to his abysmal folding skills. The second box isn’t damaged, either, lacrosse gear from high school transported across the country after learning Scott had also played.

After assessing his lacrosse stick and wondering if there was a field nearby, Stiles packs it back and turns to the third and final box. It’s a little larger than the other two, having been placed on the bottom, and its duct taped neatly. Which means it’s probably one of the ones his dad packed, because Stiles basically taped all of the ones he did twice since he can never get it right the first try. Grabbing the box cutter from Scott, he goes to town and lifts the flaps to reveal that it’s filled with stuff that he’s never seen before.

Well, not that he’s never seen a blender before. He has, but not this blender. “Cool, I think my dad bought us kitchen stuff,” he tells Scott, lifting the blender out to find a bright pink mixer underneath it. Not exactly his color, but Natalie may have picked it out, she seems like the type to like pink. Still weird, though. 

At the other side of the box, Scott is leaning over and unwrapping something that had been tightly sealed in bubble wrap. “Dude, this might have been fragile, what if I broke it?” he asks, peeling a piece of tape off and gingerly lifting an etched glass plaque out of the wrapping, a pink sticky note clinging to the front.

“Give me that,” Stiles says, reaching over and taking the glass, peeling off the Post It carelessly to better read the inscription. _Beacon Hills High School, Valedictorian, Class of 2014, Lydia Martin_. He pulls back in confusion and picks up the pink paper, trying to figure out why his dad would have accidentally sent them to him. The note is short and written a hand that’s familiar to him from seeing it on the grocery list occasionally at home.

_They finally fixed that misspelling, if you believe it. Thought you might want it up there so you could have some motivation to put MIT alongside it in 2018._

_XXX, Mom_

He puts the sticky note back and rewraps the plaque, careful to make sure that it’s secure before setting it aside and looking back in the box. Now that he’s seen that, things are making sense. Bright pink mixer, the Mary Kay box he hadn’t noticed before, not to mention the recipe for protein shakes taped to the side of the blender. The box was intended for Lydia, and for some reason his dad scrawled Stiles’s address on the top in some kind of mix up that probably means one of his boxes has been delivered to MIT. He groans and packs everything in again, this time setting the box aside where it won’t come to any harm – he’s pretty sure Lydia wouldn’t appreciate the plaque so much with a crack down the center.

“Pretty sure this stuff was supposed to go to my dad’s girlfriend’s daughter. They were probably labeling boxes together and mixed some of ours up,” he tells Scott, grabbing a water bottle from the sparsely stocked fridge,

Scott folds the flaps on the other two boxes to where they’re not open any longer, glancing around at the other boxes that had been delivered the day before. “Might want to check all of these, in case that’s not the only one,” he points out. “If they sent one, could be there’s more.”

And he’s right, of course, so Stiles groans, rolls his shoulders back, and makes a big show of looking through the boxes to make sure they’re meant for him. And they are, textbooks and CD collection, his hardback _Harry Potter_ books accompanied by their paperback partners (“Because I don’t want to mess up the nice copies, Dad!”), pots and pans for kitchen, a set of china that is bruised but not battered and had been acquired at a yard sale he’d happened upon on Beacon Hills, and a handful of trinkets from his mother he had to take with him (Mickey Mouse snow globe, a note card she’s packed in his lunch in the third grade, and a glass figurine of a tea pot).

Everything else is his, except for the box in the corner that had obviously been intended for Natalie’s daughter. Stiles takes out his phone to call his dad and ask what Lydia’s address is, but then he stops himself.

If his dad asked Natalie for Lydia’s address for Stiles, she’d start in on him again. Not that she’d entirely let up, but she’d slowed down after his call to Lydia, only making a few halfhearted suggestions that he fly into Boston and head to Yale from there before letting it go. And even though it’s for something as innocent as sending a package that wasn’t meant for him, she’d probably insist that he drive to Boston to deliver it himself.

Best to avoid that route, which means asking Lydia for her address instead. Not like it’s hard, he does have her number after all (thank you, Natalie), but she hadn’t exactly been welcoming when he’d called her a few weeks ago.

Oh well, she doesn’t need to be thrilled with him, he just needs to send her the box to her and figure out if she got one of his in return. Quick exchange of addresses and they’re done, packages sent out for delivery and he won’t need to bother her again until they probably meet over Christmas, if their parents keep on with the way they’ve been going.

“I just got a text from Cora, she and Malia are apparently picking us up for midnight karaoke at that diner on Crown,” Scott announces, leaning on the kitchen counter as he texts back an affirmative. “They’re five minutes out, you can worry about your dad’s girlfriend’s whatever later.” 

Stiles looks up from the box and nods, checking to make sure that it’s packed up before rolling his eyes. “For some reason, neither one of them strike me as the karaoke type. Derek, on the other hand, he seems like he could do some damage to _Summer Lovin’_. I just got back, I don’t want to go out, I want to go to sleep,” he presses. Scott usually caves early, but this time he’s standing resolute and shaking his head sadly.

“Apparently Cora’s blackmailed Derek into coming, so you just might get to see that if you can get enough beers in him. Remember–“

“He finishes everyone’s drinks,” they finish in unison, laughing as they remember the old adage that Cora had made them commit to memory the first time they’d gone to the bar Derek’s girlfriend worked at.

It was unfortunately true, Derek would finish any and all drinks lying around. The reason that Cora gave for not throwing house parties was that Derek didn’t clean up, just finished off the leftover cups of stale beer and ended up getting drunk all over again. Scott and Stiles had learned quickly to keep their cups guarded at all times.

Grabbing his jacket from the back of a kitchen chair, Scott points out to the parking lot through the window and scoops up his keys. “They’re here, and Cora is as patient as ever, if you can believe it. ‘Get your asses out here.’ Looks like she might have taken a manners class over the summer,” he comments, giving a quick glance over the apartment before moving for the door.

“Um, dude,” Stiles coughs awkwardly, scratching his ear. “We don’t have pants on,” he points out. They hadn’t changed since Scott’s fall interrupted their _Risky Business_ activities, and both of them are only clad in sock, a button down, and boxers.

They look at each other for a moment, eyebrows raised in surprise. The moment is ruined by an abrupt car horn, Cora trying to get them out as fast as possible, and then they laugh, loud and long. Stiles clutches at his sides, already aching, and thinks to himself that it’s good to be back.

-x-

It’s another two days before Stiles gets around to Lydia’s box, mostly because it just isn’t at the top of his to-do list. Getting WiFi is much more important than making sure his dad’s girlfriend’s daughter’s kitchen is stocked with supplies, and the same with making sure he has the right illegal textbooks downloaded. The next time he notices it is when he stubs his toe on the box while leaving the kitchen, so much for keeping it out of the way.

“Shit,” he grumbles, wincing when he sees it. The good news is that so far that’s the only box of Lydia’s he’s found. All the rest are his, from the shitty paperback science fiction novels he devoured by the dozen in high school to the camping gear he bought in preparation for spring break. “Do we have packing tape?” he calls down the hallway.

Scott pokes his head out a moment later, eyebrow raised as he glances around for Stiles. “Nah, I can grab some when I go out tomorrow. What’s up?”

“I have to send this stuff to Lydia. Dad’s girlfriend’s daughter,” he clarifies when Scott doesn’t recognize the name. “She might actually need some of this stuff, I don’t want to be the one responsible when she can’t… I don’t know, blend things,” he tries, remembering the blender that they’d first uncovered.

Grabbing a bottled water from the fridge, Scott moves around him until he’s next to the box as well, nudging it with his foot. “So have you met this girl?” he asks, kneeling and opening the flaps to reveal the contents once more. Sifting through the various balled up newspapers, he gently sets aside the valedictorian plaque they’d found the last time and holds up a boxed slinky with a short laugh. 

Well, Stiles hasn’t met her, but he’s called her because her mother is a woman on a mission when it comes to him and her daughter. As weird as that is, and even Lydia thinks so, at least Natalie hasn’t called him since he’d been at Yale in an attempt to get him over to Boston. “No, I talked to her once on the phone. Why?”

Lifting out a Tupperware container loaded down with cookies, Scott shrugs and contains pawing through it all. “Curious, is all. Wait, what’s this?” he asks, pulling a hanger with a zippered bag attached to it. Inside the bag is a thick navy fabric that had been hidden by the mixer. It’s a dress, made of the jersey material that doesn’t wrinkle. Tugging experimentally on it, he watches the fabric stretch and then resume its original shape with wonder.

“Yeah, I guess so. I should get this stuff back to her soon.” Stiles runs his fingers through his hair and tries to figure out when he’ll have time to go by the post office tomorrow. He’d already told Cora that he and Scott would play ultimate Frisbee with her, but that’s in the afternoon, and they’ll probably get dinner afterwards. “Can I borrow your car tomorrow, before lunch?” And even if he does hate waking up early, it’ll be nice to get something checked off of his to do list. Good deed done for the day and everything, and he’ll still have time for ultimate.

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Scott says, distracted. He’s squinting at the dress in the way that he typically does at calculus problems, and Stiles isn’t sure why he looks like that until he comments, “It’s really stretchy.”

The material is stretchy, not that Stiles has been paying much attention, but he nods anyway and then shakes his head immediately after. He doesn’t know what Scott’s got in his head, but the other boy has the mischievous look he usually only wears while convincing Cora to take a night off studying and help them prank Derek. “No, whatever you’re thinking of, I can guarantee it’s going to be a bad idea. I don’t even know this girl!”

Scott rolls his eyes and throws the dress over his shoulder, and Stiles has a moment where he considers tackling his friend before figuring that plan might rip the dress in the process. “Chill out, I’m going to try it on,” he says – as though that’s supposed to put Stiles at ease when all it manages is the opposite.

That is the worst idea in the history of ever. And yet, Stiles can’t stop himself from snorting. “Dude, you probably can’t even fit in it – let me see the tag,” he says, reaching over and flipping it before nodding, suspicions confirmed. “You’re not a size 4, I hate to break it to you. You’re going to break the dress, just put it back and I’ll send the box to her tomorrow.” Shit, he still needs to get Lydia’s address.

Squinting at the tag, Scott looks at Stiles and then back at the tag. “The fabric is super stretchy, it’ll be fine,” he says, walking down the hallway while Stiles is still too surprised to do anything about it.

Stiles gets himself into gear at the same moment that the lock on Scott’s room clicks, and then he’s just weakly pounding at his roommate’s door, making poor protests in the process. “Dude, she doesn’t know me, how many times do I have to tell you? If I send her dress ripped, that’s not exactly the first impression I want to make – she’ll probably think I ripped it, not your pudgy potato pouch!” It’s hopeless and he knows it.

“I have a six pack and you’re jealous,” Scott shouts through the door.

He’s right, that bastard. Not that Stiles is necessarily lacking in terms of physicality, but he tends to stick to running, which doesn’t have the same impact on the abdominals. “Fuck off and give the dress back,” he shouts, cutting himself off when he has to step back to avoid the door swinging open suddenly.

Behind the door, Scott is standing proudly in the dress. It’s a tight fit, but he’d been right when he guessed that the fabric could still accommodate him. Stiles gapes at him, because it’s not like he woke up this morning and expected to see Scott in a dress. “Dude, get the fuck out of that,” he demands, nevertheless scrambling to grab his phone. Cora is never going to believe him, Derek is going to get a kick out of it, and Malia will never be able to look at Scott without raising her eyebrows again. He needs evidence.

“Shut up, I look great,” Scott declares, oblivious to Stiles opening up his camera app across the room. To prove his point, he goes so far as to strike a pose, and that’s when the shutter sound goes off. “Oh my God, what the hell man, delete that shit. I’ll take the dress off, just delete it.” He adds a swear under his breath.

Disbelieving, Stiles waves his phone as leverage. “If you get it off fast enough, I won’t send it.” That’s a blatant lie, but Scott is desperate enough to believe it, as evidenced by the way that he slams the door shut.

That snapshot is going to Malia, Cora, and Derek. Hell, he’s nineteen and sometimes makes terrible decisions, why not send it to Lydia as well and let her see what her dress has gotten up to in her absence? With that, he attaches the picture for Lydia and adds a quick note, _More of a winter color in my opinion_ , because he’s a jackass.

By the time Scott’s made it outside and has handed back the dress, Stiles already has the delivery notifications from the four he sent it out to. “Thank you,” he intones graciously, lifting it up so the bottom doesn’t trail on the ground. The damage is already done, not like their floor is going to be any worse than Scott wearing it, but it’s the thought that counts.

“Not cool,” Scott says, tugging on his shirt and flipping Stiles off. “But I probably should have seen it coming.”

Understatement of the century. Stiles laughs and offers a two-fingered salute, because he’s nothing if not forgiving to Scott, who could probably burn the apartment down and all Stiles would be able to do in return is laugh and say that he didn’t like the pattern of the couch either, but at least it hadn’t driven him to arson. He goes to tell Scott this and is cut off when his phone starts buzzing.

Scott grabs it first, and his eyebrows rise a few centimeters before he shoves it back to Stiles like it’s about to detonate on him. “Shit,” he whispers, voice almost reverent.

Rolling his eyes, Stiles takes the phone and pauses to check the caller ID before answering it. “Shit,” he echoes weakly, suddenly understanding of why Scott had pushed the phone away. He kind of wishes he could do it, too. On the screen, beneath the gray screen that appears for people he doesn’t have a contact picture for, Lydia Martin is calling.


	2. Male Circumcision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In an effort to make her privacy feel a little less invaded, Lydia unpacks some things of Stiles's.

Hands tightening on the steering wheel, Lydia glares at the road and waits for Stiles to pick up. When the ringing stops, too early for her call to have gone to voicemail unless he’s ignoring her – and she’d love for him to ignore her, really, she _dares_ him to try it – she starts in without waiting for him to try to placate her with a tentative hello that he probably learned to give old ladies, the model sheriff’s son that he must be.

“What the _fuck_ do you think you’re doing?” she snarls, whipping into a turn a little too fast, but Allison, bless her, only grabs the “oh shit” handle above her seat and doesn’t say anything. Lydia makes a small mental note to not kill Allison as collateral damage when she does, inevitably, go on a murderous rampage to kill Stiles.

On the other end of the line, Stiles starts to stutter, but it’s her time to talk and she’ll be damned if he thinks he can talk his way out of this one. Danny looked up his police record, he’s been arrested twice and never charged, so he’s probably not used to consequences of his actions. Good, because she’s going to enjoy this.

“If a single thread is out of place, I’m going to buy an entirely new dress and bill it to you. My best friend is a hacker, if you think he can’t do it, I’ll be happy to send all of the student loans of MIT’s incoming class your way as well.” She’s going to wear that dress to the poster presentation her department is giving in two weeks, and she can’t do that if it’s stretched out from Stiles’s shoulders, because she’s betting he’s not a size 4 if that picture is anything to go by. She pauses to take in a breath, trying to collect herself before she remembers the picture he sent her and realizes she doesn’t have single reason to act calmly about this.

Checking the speed limit sign and making sure that her speedometer is aligned with the law, Lydia goes on, “I will personally drive to your house and string you up by your nose hairs if any more harm comes to that dress. So unless you want to die slowly and in pain, put it back into the box and ship it to me. I will send you my address, and I expect you to put it on priority, because if it’s not on my doorstep by Monday morning I’ll find you.”

A beat passes, Stiles trying to figure out whether she’s good and truly finished or is just taking a breather before going back to ripping him a new one. “I’ll ship it tonight, I promise. Really, and I’m so sorry about this.” He sounds winded, as though he’d had a small back up plan in place, but her fit has blown it out of the water.

Lydia thinks it over for a moment and rolls her shoulders back, checking her mirrors as she does so. She likes being in power, and one more person with a little more fear in his life isn’t such a bad thing. “What kind of person tries on a dress that isn’t theirs, that’s very expensive, and that they could damage in the process?” She even pauses to let him answer, because she’s a little calmer and ready to put herself in his state of mind before attacking again.

“I’m not really sure, one moment it was out of the box, next thing I know…” Stiles drifts off, probably uncomfortable telling her about the entire process. The thing is, though, that dresses don’t just appear on people’s bodies. Lydia has been in enough changing rooms to know that, and she’s not about to let him get away with it.

With a huff, she goes to tell him as much and stops when she hears him do the same.

“I’m really sorry about it, I don’t know what I was thinking.” He sounds rightfully ashamed and in enough fear of her that he’ll follow her instructions. Which is really to his benefit – she hasn’t decided whether she’s joking about the ‘stringing him up by his nose hairs’ bit.

Still, it’s a genuine apology and she’s not quite used to that. Most of the people in Lydia’s life, herself included, don’t apologize. Not that they make excuses, but they form explanations and agree to not repeat things and that’s as close to an apology as she gets. Even Allison doesn’t really apologize for much, just rolls her eyes and tells Lydia she should have known better than to leave out a slice of chocolate cake uncovered on the counter.

Maybe she had that one coming, now that she thinks about it. No, no, not about the cake, she needs to get back to the dress. He caught her off guard, though, and she gives a small sigh as she lets some of her anger go.

“I just need the dress here as soon as possible. Can you ship it out tonight?” she asks, trying to keep her shoulders straight even as Allison spares her a curious glance and a raised eyebrow. She’s not weak, she just needs him to not hate her so much that he doesn’t even bother to send her the dress. To have an excuse to not turn to Allison and stick her tongue out in the most childish of ways, she focuses on parallel parking.

Stiles takes a moment, clearly confused about how her change in attitude came about. “Yeah, I definitely will. Again, I am so sorry, I should have just sent the box to you as soon as I found it and saved all this trouble. Can you text me your address? I’d ask for you to say it, but I don’t have any… Oh, wait, I have paper.”

Blinking, Lydia trades a glance with Allison as she disconnects the Bluetooth from her phone and takes the key from the ignition. She halfheartedly listens to Stiles talk about finding a pen as his previous statement sinks in, and the furor that had abandoned her comes back with a vengeance. Carefully, as Allison passes her and fiddles with the lock, Lydia stands a little straighter and asks, “How long ago did you find it?”

Offhand, he comments, “Like two days ago, not that long,” as though he hasn’t just made her attitude do a one-eighty twice in less than three minutes. “I found a pen, so you can give me your address now.”

Oh, no. He’s not getting off that easy. Intentionally chilly, Lydia marches through the doorway and looks down at the boxes her mother sent her. They arrived yesterday, and she hasn’t had the chance to go through them yet, but now the idea has entered her head that, perhaps, if her mother accidentally sent one of her boxes to Stiles, Stiles’s father could have sent one of his boxes to her. She moves fast, grabbing a kitchen knife and waving Allison off, mouthing _I’m fine_ as if she doesn’t look like a woman possessed.

She rattles off her address, slicing the tape open on the first of the two. It’s hers, the encyclopedia set she got in the ninth grade that she probably needs a new one of and a box with copies of her mother’s recipes. The next one is filled with binders, so it’s probably hers too, but she opens one on a whim and her jaw drops.

“You wrote a paper on the history of male circumcision?” she demands suddenly, cutting herself off from listing the zip code. Zip code be damned, what’s really important is the paper in front of her with Stiles’s Stilinski’s name at the top and a detailed timeline of the removal of the foreskin. She flips through the pages wildly, trying to make sense of everything while simultaneously being astounded that there’s so much information.

Stiles coughs violently and asks, “Where did you even get that?” He stops, dumbfounded, and then says, “Oh my God, please don’t read it, I’m begging you, I don’t know how you have that, but please,” he pleads, trying desperately to come up with some way to convince her to put the paper down.

Eyes widening, she chokes out, “There’s an entire section on ‘Accidental Castration – The Willy that Wasn’t.’ Did you actually turn this in to someone?” Because it’s one thing to write a history of male circumcision, it’s another thing entirely to add creatively titled subheadings.

Beside her, Allison coughs at the phrase and leans over Lydia’s shoulder to ensure that her roommate isn’t just making it up. She shudders quietly before picking up her mug of tea and going into her room.

“Oh my God, I asked you not to read it, don’t you listen, Jesus. I didn’t turn it in to someone, okay, I did, but the paper that I turned in was more on-topic, and I wrote it in sophomore year or something.” He makes a strange kind of noise, like he’s trying to figure out how to bodily force her into putting the paper down while he’s over a hundred miles away, and then some strangled choking noise.

She squints and keeps on reading, because Stiles’s opinion means jack shit to her right now, he tried on her dress and the least that she can do is read some papers. The works cited is the most interesting part of the paper, and she can’t help but keep a laugh down as she reads the ‘Foreplay without Foreskin’ title. “Okay, but that leads me to believe you came back and edited it, and I just don’t understand why.” Even if it is informative reading. Not necessarily relevant or something she’ll ever need to know, but informative all the same.

“My friend’s brother, he’s my friend too, he’s a history grad student here and convinced me to pick it up again as a side project when I mentioned it at one point. Derek was really stuck on me getting a paper done before undergrad, and when I brought this up he forced me to finish. That’s the latest draft, okay, I wasn’t going to keep the subheadings like that. Please don’t keep reading,” he asks of her again.

Flipping to the next paper, something boring about the American industrial revolution and being compared to the industrial revolution in Britain with a lot of background on agriculturally based societies, she keeps going because the best way to ensure Lydia does something is to ask her to not. Mid-way through, she finds something of merit.

When she’s quiet, Stiles lets out a heavy breath. “You kept reading, didn’t you? Look, it’s really hard to get statistics on circumcision, even from psych students you’re willing to pay, so, yes, the ‘select group’ is me and a few friends, but, no, I’m not telling you which measurement is mine.”

“Oh, God,” Lydia says, eyebrows rising to her hairline. Because, no, she hadn’t seen any kind of chart with measurements and now she never wants to. She’ll be staying far away from that paper, please and thank you. “Not what I was going to bring up next. I was more interested in your discussion of cultural and historical significance of the Ewoks in _Star Wars_. Not penis measurements.” The words squeak out of her as a blush rises on her cheeks, and Allison throws open her door at the worst possible time, only to promptly slam it shut again.

Staying silent, he finally says, “Oh. That, uh, wasn’t what I thought you were going to say.” Clearly. “That one took me a while, Scott and I were experimenting with the best way to watch the movies – do you watch the original trilogy or the prequels first? Theatrical order is better, because I really hate Episode I…”

“Machete order,” she responds, because that’s her tried and true method. It’s how she introduced Allison to the movies, after she and Danny discovered the order in the depths of the Internet. “Episodes IV and V, flashback to Episodes II and III, and then tie everything together with Episode VI. It works better if you want to view the series as Anakin’s redemption arc, like Lucas intended.” And it comes with the added bonus of little to no Jar-Jar Binks.

Stiles doesn’t speak, and she’s about to ask if he even heard her when he whispers in a reverent tone, “Holy shit, you’re a genius. That… That would work, you keep all the plot twists, oh my God. I’m in love with you right now.”

That would probably mean more coming from someone that she actually knows, but Lydia will take what she can get. And if what she can get is nerds bowing down to her Star Wars viewing process, she goes to MIT and she’s kind of used to those kinds of things. “Thanks,” she drawls, scanning through his conclusion.

“I have to tell Scott, this is going to change everything. You’re a goddess, thank you.” He breaths out fast, like he’s preparing for something and then, then just says in a slightly smaller voice, “Can you give me the zip code? I really do what to have this out to you by Monday, so I need to make to the post office by five.”

Zip code? Oh, her address, of course. Unnerved by the fact they’d gotten so off topic, she tells him her zip code and makes him repeat the entire thing back to her. She’d rather her neighbors not randomly get her deliveries, all things considered. And after he does the same, her copying down the New Haven address in her tidy script and sticking the Post It Note to the box as a quick reminder to ship it out when she gets a chance.

“Hey, I would love to stay and talk cinematic masterpieces all day, but I actually have a few errands to run. It’s been great talking with you, though, Lydia. I’m not as weirded out by your mother trying to force us together now that I know you like _Star Wars_ ,” Stiles jokes, laughing a little as he thinks about Natalie.

Lydia gives a pinched smile before remembering he can’t see her face. Movie compatibility isn’t the only thing on her list, so she still needs to have words with her mother, but Stiles is right that things now aren’t so weird. She’s held a conversation with the boy and he wasn’t a complete asshole. He did try on her dress, but she’s working on moving past that, all things considered. “Yeah, well, at least you’re not a Trekkie.”

And, really, she should learn to think before she speaks, because Stiles gives an appalled little gasp and says, “If I had more time, I would tell you about all of the ways that _Star Trek_ changed television, but I really do have to go, but it’s going to bother me if I don’t. I’m going to text you,” he declares.

“It was a joke,” she deadpans, rolling her eyes. “Priority shipping, please.”

“Priority shipping, Monday morning or else you string me up by my nose hairs, got it. Hey, if you do come to do that, we should at least take a picture before. To make your mom happy, although I doubt she’d let up after that… Anywho, I’ve got to be off. Sorry about the dress, again. Bye, Lydia,” he says, hanging up.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, she looks at the notebook in front of her and the several more in the box. Bidden by curiosity, she flips through a few at random. They’re mostly lab reports, some jotted notes on political debates, and there’s a good section on the biological systems of elephants for some unknown reason. She packs everything up after she goes through it, finally giving in and taking out the original binder again.

Stiles never said that she had to have his stuff back to him on Monday. And, really, if she has to take a day to make a response to his theories on the Ewoks, he probably won’t mind. So if she breaks out her laptop and _Return of the Jedi_ , nobody besides Allison needs to know.


End file.
